Traffic congestion is anti-national but there exists a way out

Imagine this happens a couple of times every day and you have no choice but to suffer such interactions. What would your opinion be of other people? What would theirs be of you? Can endlessly repeated negative interactions form the basis of social trust?

Bad traffic is destroying social capital in India, undermining our already weak sense of fraternity. By exposing our worst forms to each other, we reinforce the manifold prejudices that we harbour. To the extent that it exacerbates social divisions and precludes fraternity, bad traffic on our roads is anti-national.

There have been studies that try to quantify the economic costs of traffic congestion. My public policy students found that the full economic costs can be at least ₹40,000 crore per year for Bengaluru alone. The Centre of Ecological Science found that 43% of the carbon emissions in the city come from vehicles. 

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The state pollution board estimates that 32% of the fine dust pollution is due to traffic jams contributing to the respiratory disease burden. The Hindu reported that traffic-related issues were the foremost cause of anxiety among motorists in the city.

These are bad enough, but the most insidious effect might be damage to social capital. Since you need social capital to address economic, environmental and health problems, the poisonous effect of traffic on social relationships is far more dangerous, far less visible, and perhaps incalculable.

Our congested roads and messy traffic deter intra-city travel. Bengaluru, where I live, is a city united by weather but divided by traffic. So people tend to avoid events in other parts of town if they have a choice. 

They might attend family, school and office functions because they have to, but will miss functions organized by distant relatives, acquaintances and not-too-close friends. Religious festivals maybe, but civic events not really.

People in the city spend time restricted to a few localities and thus have a weak sense of being Bangalorean. Increasingly, they order food and groceries home, further minimizing interaction with others. 

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Netflix becomes more attractive when the alternative is a hour-long battle to get to a multiplex. Public transport, which all sections of society use, is inadequate. So there are more people in cars and on motorcycles, insulated from those unlike them.

Traffic is among the factors causing people to live in their own bubbles, with weak bridges of social capital between these bubbles. This plays to weaknesses of India’s hyper-diverse society, where communities often treat one another with distrust. 

This leads to suboptimal cooperation and results in inadequate supply of public goods and their frequent abuse. It is why we have littered streets, polluted water bodies, water scarcity and dirty cityscapes. 

It is also why we have bad governance and pervasive corruption. Absent a broader sense of ‘us,’ selfishness is rational, and we grab what we can of the public resources before ‘they’ do.

Cities are supposed to break down the oppressive social hierarchies of rural areas, releasing people from old caste structures into a new socio-economic canvas. 

Mumbai, more than any other Indian city, managed to evolve its own distinct identity by amalgamating the diverse people who became part of its social mix over three centuries. 

Despite its constrained geography, it managed this feat, credit for which must go in no small measure to efficient public transport. Today, however, I am not sure it is as much as a melting pot as it once was.

Improving public transport helps and is a necessary part of any solution. But it won’t solve the social capital problem by itself. Nor will the casually chanted slogan of “we need better enforcement" of traffic rules. 

We need a re-commitment to being better citizens on our roads. It is as much about individual and civic awakening as it is about public policy.

We can characterize the traffic problem as a grand Prisoner’s Dilemma, where it is rational for an individual to behave selfishly because one expects everyone else to be selfish. 

We can ‘solve’ this dilemma when people behave better because they know others will behave better and this outcome is in one’s self-interest.

I used to be pessimistic about improving traffic because things would only change when everyone changes. But I now suspect there are reasons for optimism if we look at it from the lens of complexity science. 

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It is possible to change overall behaviour by cascading behavioural change. Get a critical mass to act differently and sustain it until it permeates society. We need to adopt entirely different forms of civic action to achieve this objective.

Cities are India’s best hope of creating a national consciousness that transcends caste identity. Yet, our pattern of urbanization is creating new divides that are obstructing the formation of a genuine national consciousness. For how can a society were people are angry with each other be a nation?